Thursday oil spiked 7%,today it lowered somewhat, closing just over 50. gratned the price has balanced between just over 52 and close to 50 a barrel, but now we’ve got a 2 day increase as inflation fears rise. it’s not good.
as unemployment increases and inventories decrease, not to mention inflation, high fuel prices will really hurt alot of people. granted we’re not there yet. but these are trends to watch, i’m very concerned about it.
and don’t get me started if the administration puts an increased federal tax on gas.
Not much to say. Refineries are cutting back production, OPEC’s members are all in line reducing production quotas. Control the supply, you control the demand AND the price. Comes at a bad time, but at least the money folks have something to throw their cash at while the rest of us take it up the rear.
Oil always beings to increase in the spring and thru the summer. But sooner or later we will have major inflation. And with the deficits we are looking at (CBO says 9T over the next 10 years), they will find all kind of ways to tax everyone, so why not increasing the gas tax.
remember how everyone flipped out when gas was 4 bucks or slightly higher?
imagine how that would hurt now with higher unemployment, and the impending inflation.
i shudder to think…hopefully the idiots will continue to delay their fantasies with increased federal gas tax. my God.
high fuel prices put a widespread hurt. it makes manufacturing more expensive, overhead higher at the corporate level, not to mention the trickle down to an outrageous price tag on a gallon of milk. yeouch.
and mike, the analysts say that the concerns of impending inflation are driving the rally on crude. ruh roh.
When the Fed (which is not the president keep in mind) announced that it would intervene at the long end of the yield curve, it readily notified the market that it was prepared to throw the kitchen sink and the financial problems of this country even if it meant dealing with inflation. This program is inflationary (it’s essentially just printing money), as it is driving prices in the market up for treasures, and ultimately that will translate in to higher prices for good and services. Oil is the leading responder and it spiked accordingly. You can’t simply print money unabashed and not have it be inflationary.
Yes, high fuel prices will hurt a lot of people, but we need to break our consumption dependency. Pain is the precursor to behavior change. You should fully expect that we will need to tax a variety of consumption items to rebuild our revenue base. Unfortunately you have to create pain in some places in order to cure the larger problem. Recoveries are painful exercises.
It is fun, but the horse has bad gas and burps allot…we do however use its dung as a heat source and bake with it as well. I am going carbon neutral baby!
Shit thing is, to this day in most states a horse and buggy still has right of way on most roads - that would piss me off even more than the god damn electric cars that are always drag racing the mail main.
i’m with you (except for the increased federal gas tax at this time), and it’s why i’m not lining up to suck Obama’s big one.
inflation, high unemployment…hmmm…sounds a bit like jimmy carter days. i hope we don’t wind up burning bundles of money just to stay warm (as people did in the depression).
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high fuel prices put a widespread hurt. it makes manufacturing more expensive, overhead higher at the corporate level, not to mention the trickle down to an outrageous price tag on a gallon of milk. yeouch.
How does raising the Gas tax achieve all these things? Commercial trucks run on diesel and pay a lower tax rate on that diesel than you or I would.
This is what those who want to save the planet need to do charge the gas up to $5 a gallon and our consumption goes done, dropping demand for oil and the price for a barrel of crude, anything else that needs oil becomes cheaper. We all are plugged in to the grid selling our execess charge back to the grid (come on The Pres said so last night on his press conference oops I mean his appearance on a late night talk show WTF?)
Anyhow if we have to save the planet lets get on with saving it.
if you read it again, the point was that high fuel prices put pressure on manufacturing (because plants run on fuel. AK Steel, for example, easily has at least a 10 million dollar monthly energy bill. now consider the price of crude last summer, the monthly energy bill was much higher. this has a negative ripple effect, obviously).
furthermore, if fuel is high, it’s more expensive to transport foodstuffs, run farms, etc. that’s how your gallon of milk can become outrageous. this can happen without an increase of federal gas tax.
so with crude prices increasing,in light of the feds putting us in a high probability of inflation, we could all be praying that gas was just 5 bucks a gallon. consider then if increased federal gas taxes get dumped on top of an already high price of crude, well you can see therein lies the concern.
the bottom line is that we cannot spend the amount of national security and educaton combined on company bailouts, make our dollar worthless, have high unemployment with a shoddy financial market, and continue to tax the shit out of people and businesses. there is too much pressure, something will have to give. more than likely it will be obama’s career as president.
As a geddam libral 'viromentalist and believer in Peak Oil my opinion is we can virtually guarantee gas prices will go back up and just go higher and higher, even if the world economy plunges off a cliff (which it hasn’t yet). And no we can’t drill our way out of it (But we will try, have no doubt).
I would rather spend a few hundred billion not on all those banks and other bailouts, but instead use it to perfect ways to transport things using a lot less fossil fuel, but what do I know? I suspect we are too late on this, but this recession is buying us a little time. The slurp from the bottom of the Saudi cup is certainly less forceful than it was 2-3 years ago.
As a geddam libral 'viromentalist and believer in Peak Oil my opinion is we can virtually guarantee gas prices will go back up and just go higher and higher, even if the world economy plunges off a cliff (which it hasn’t yet). And no we can’t drill our way out of it (But we will try, have no doubt).
I would rather spend a few hundred billion not on all those banks and other bailouts, but instead use it to perfect ways to transport things using a lot less fossil fuel, but what do I know? I suspect we are too late on this, but this recession is buying us a little time. The slurp from the bottom of the Saudi cup is certainly less forceful than it was 2-3 years ago.
I’m another libral. And I agree we should look to alternative energy sources, but not because the world is in danger of running out of oil. There’s still a tremendous amount of oil out there, and reserve counts are still growing. It’ll just get more expensive to extract. The Hubbert Peak is flawed in that it assumes we won’t alter oil extraction techniques as the price of oil increases. As more expensive techniques become economically viable, supply will meet demand. It’ll just be more expensive. I speculate that oil prices of around $200-$500 will sustain production at near today’s levels for many decades. Of course at that price, a ton of non-oil energy system become viable as well.
The reason to try to reduce oil dependence are more for environmental and national security reasons than economic.
I disagree with the assertion that the recession is buying time. The recession is bad. If the economy were producing “extra” money it would be politically more expedient more aggressively push oil-attenuating legislation. Interfering with market efficiency in a recession is a lot more difficult.
Drilling oil in the US is one of the most clean ways to get fuel. My family drills oil all around the earth, no longer in the US at all. Seems the US has these pesky things such as the EPA, OSHA and on and on that just trys to make them stop drilling here - even though a drop spilled is money lost. Sure, no one wants a refinery in their back yard - but they have to be somewhere. We feel much better when we get our oil from places with no EPA or OSHA or even employee rights.
Most of my families rigs are now off of South America, Eastern Africa and near Vantau in the southern Pacific. The oil producers then ship the oil long distances to get it to us in a very unsafe way…but, can you tell me how many disasters were caused by the Alaskan Pipeline, or the many other US/Canadian lines that run today?
